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When I sound the fairy call, gather here in silent meeting, Chin to knee on the orchard wall, cooled with dew and cherries eating. Merry, merry, take a cherry, mine are sounder, mine are rounder, Mine are sweeter for the eater, when the dews fall, and you'll be fairies all. - Emily Dickinson
"The old cherry ...

Pastry, Petitions, and Politics Part III
I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson
Summer arrives in Chinon on the first wave of tourists; bicycles clog the courtyard; buses disgorge bedraggled groups weary from travel yet pleased to be in such a charming ...

Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade. - Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse
It was a tangle of brambles and ivy, a wilderness of sticks and dried grass and odd and unknown stalks of something or other sticking heavenward willy-nilly across the landscape. The old wooden gate pushed open to ...

Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
After a week of chilly, dreary days, heavy granite skies, the wind whipping in circles around the courtyard, flicking leaves across the stones and spattering rain against the windows, battering down onto the cement of the terrace, the sun has arrived ...

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. - Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg
Spring has finally arrived in Chinon. Wild winds, grey skies, spattering rain are interspersed with flashes of bright sunlight filtering through hazy skies and lighting up the courtyard, brushing against the windows and warming the breakfast room. ...

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. - Charles de Gaulle
The Hôtel Diderot is on the edge of old Chinon, tucked away at the end of a quiet street behind an elegant, tarnished white ironwork gate. Serenity in a tranquil town. Days in ...

A small town is a place where there's no place to go where you shouldn't. - Burt Bacharach
I like the small-townness of Chinon. Everyone seems to know one another but not in an American small-town way; the knowing is very discreet, a restrained nod of the head in passing, a simple acknowledgement of recognition, of ...

AND GOING
Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real. - Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
I am surrounded by suitcases many open and half filled, the sun streaming in the windows of this apartment that we will leave in just two days. Cartons are stacked high to the ceiling, rolls of ...

Well, friends, I think we just bought a hotel.
You have to make it happen. - Denis Diderot
When they say that life is an adventure, I believe that they must have meant this.
My head is spinning and I keep pinching myself. The story will be a while in the telling, the adventure unfolding one day at a ...

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